Cyberpunk 2077 devs express relief at Phantom Liberty praise - "we needed to really redeem ourselves!"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion is attracting very positive reviews, and CD Projekt staff are naturally quite pleased about this. And also, very relieved. Released in 2020, the original Cyberpunk 2077 stands as an uncommonly thunderous example of overhype and project mismanagement, with technical issues at launch that extended from comical bugs such as disappearing penises to serious breaches such as graphical effects capable of triggering epileptic fits. CD Projekt have spent years attempting to address the underlying systemic and workplace issues and claw back some goodwill - hence, the general atmosphere on Xitter of developers needing to take five and stare at a flowerbed for a while. "It was a rough few years but there's finally celebration and closure (for me at least)," posted senior level designer Seb Mcbride.

In RockPaperShotgun's own Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review, Graham summed it up as "perhaps the best expansion ever made", which has gone down a treat with the developers. "Is it? Maybe!" cinematic designer Michał Zbrzeźniak posted. "I mean, the amount of work that was put into it results in what I think is one of the most robust and content rich expansions. But we also needed to really redeem ourselves!"

In fairness to rank-and-file CD Projekt developers, many of Cyberpunk 2077's issues appear to have originated at the top of the ladder. Studio bosses confessed after release that they "ignored signals about the need for additional time to refine the game", and CD Projekt Red investors eventually sued the company for making "materially false or misleading statements" about the condition of the game.

The game's pre-release marketing was also blighted by fetishistic transphobic